I am in the planning stages of a parallax side-scrolling game and wanted to use a game engine to help accelerate its development. The action will be very much like Double Dragon or Golden Axe for the main levels with a switch to a static first person for the boss battles. The largest difference would be that it would be ranged, not melee combat. Of course cost is an issue, which is why I was leaning toward Unity3d or cocos2d though it seems like one is overkill and the other a bit weak. Any input from the community here would be a great help. Thanks!
Make your own engine, actually there are no engines with such features (side scroller), but you can create your own classes to expand cocos2d. Unity3d is totally useless to make a game 2d for me, too heavy. I've released some time ago my own 2d engine, it's available on github if you want to take a look
So this more like contra than golden axe. From my experience cocos2d should be more than enough for what you need.. and its open source and dont cost you a dime.. Take care Kwbcttttpahlg
I want to have a little depth of field, like in the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Double Dragon http://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l/37031-double-dragon-genesis-screenshot-they-were-waiting-for-me.gif
I know I probably sound like a broken record by now, but I would recommend Corona again for this. There are some examples in the code section of parallax scrolling, though I haven't tested them myself. But in any case it should be more than enough to handle what you need.
Get a good artist, most all of that is just art. In the end you have a standard scrolling tile map, that has layers of which you can move your character between. Objects/enemies exist on a given layer. I imagine cocos2d would be more than enough.
Take a look at wispin it was made with coco2d and oozes quality. I cant think of anything 2d you cant make with cocos.
Just for infos, We are working on a double dragon kind of game"brotherhood of violence" and we build the engine from scratch. It s a little bit more work but it s worth it...
Thanks for pointing Wispin out for me, it does ooze! Being an absolute novice with no programming skillz (going to hire out) Cocos2d looks to be a good start. Thanks!
Cocos2D is certainly much more than enough to achieve this. It has everything you do, and I recommend reading Steffen Itterheim's Learn iPhone and iPad cocos2d Game Development if you want to go this route. It has many practical examples that can help you directly with your game. But, if you have never programmed in your life, Corona SDK is a good choice, even though I have not seen anybody doing a side-scroller yet, creating it is not difficult on the platform. There is also some parallax scrolling module that might help you. I tend to agree with Eskema about Unity 3D. While you can make 2D games with it, it is in my opinion overkill for a 2D side scrolling game unless you need 3D elements for your art style (Unity has a great side-scrolling demo on their website) or you need to use 3D for your art pipeline. The guys of Zombieville USA, for example, used Unity to create their game and also their following games. While there where some hiccups at first, it helped them a lot in animating their characters and overall giving the "smooth" feel the game has (or at least had at time of release). But I think you can achieve a similar look and gameplay using only Cocos2D.
